By the year 2050 the world’s urban population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion, with nearly 90% of that growth occurring in cities across Asia and Africa. To effectively plan for this population growth, respond to crises, and understand urbanization’s impact, governments, humanitarian organizations, and researchers need data about buildings and infrastructure, including how they are changing over time. However, many regions across the Global South lack access to this data, hindering development efforts.
In 2021, we launched the Open Buildings dataset, significantly increasing the number of publicly mapped buildings in Africa. We later expanded the effort to include buildings in Latin America, the Caribbean, and South and Southeast Asia. Since then, the Open Buildings dataset has been widely used by UN agencies, NGOs and researchers for planning electrification, crisis response, vaccination campaigns, and more.
Open Buildings dataset users have requested data showing building changes over time, which can improve urban planning and help us better understand changes in human impact on the environment. Another common request is for approximate building heights, which can help estimate population density for disaster response or resource allocation efforts. Both of these are challenging due to the limitations of available high-resolution satellite imagery captured only at certain places and times. For some rural locations and the Global South the last imagery was captured years ago, making it challenging to effectively track changes or understand the current situation.
To that end, we introduce the Open Buildings 2.5D Temporal Dataset, which is based on new experimental results that estimate changes over time and provide height data for buildings across the Global South. The dataset annually generates a map of estimated building presence, counts and heights from 2016 to 2023, and covers a 58M km2 region across Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia using 10m resolution imagery from Sentinel-2. It can be accessed at the Open Buildings site or through Earth Engine.